This is a theoretical deliberation on a social phenomenon; unnecessary police violence.
In Anchorage last week police entered a home following up on a call and shot to death a 16 year old girl with a knife. Like most other major urban police forces the officers were members of a union. Can the union mentality be a cause for overly lethal police violence? Instead of defunding police could it be that de-unionizing police departments would restore a equality in identity with citizenship and humanity to law enforcement?
Government unions are dangerous. They build a wall between themselves as self identity as ordinary citizens of a democracy. Ordinary policemen and government employees don’t share the same self-identity as being equal independent people. In order for the Bolshevik revolution to happen, soviet or in effect sovereign unions needed to infiltrate the military. When the Kronstadt naval rebellion occurred the cascade of union revolutions followed.
Unions can promote the sort of class consciousness found in gangs. Gangs and wolf packs can defend themselves too aggressively and effectively for their targets to survive close encounters. Wolves respect humans generally for their size and leave them alone. Wolves have a sense of easy association with humans, unlike police members of unions.
Cruising in cars sets them apart from two-leggers on the street easily as may walking heavily loaded with weapons, chemical mace, and clubs. They do not identify with the groups they police. So much as the great union pay and benefits.
Union programming sometimes transcends ordinary citizenship growing intolerant of any kind of threat to job security and risk from ‘scabs’. Hence the inclination to use excessive force to subdue dissent from civilians that appear to be any kind of threat to class security and power. Union broadcasters probably have their six. Government unions displace individual citizens as the primary people for government to serve. Instead the government exists to pay union members better salaries and retirement benefits. Union power has spread over governments like fungus. Reform becomes impossible.
Honest police forces are necessary for the stability of a healthy social environment where individuals and their rights including privacy have the primary and fundamental place in civil society. There can be higher and more power social class such as unions can present. Unions with guns can be hazardous to civil health, law and order.
The most civil violence in American cities beginning with the black lives matter movement occurred in cities with left-leaning politicians. Cities like Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington have experienced leftist, pro-union leadership and protracted periods of near urban anarchy since the Obama administration. Union workers probably don’t regard themselves as leftists, though politicians do.
Violence and police violence have raised calls to defund police from the left. Politicians of the left generally have union support. The entire situation can be self-reinforcing with class conscious union police using violence o leftist protesters to get support fro leftist politicians and media to defund police and redistribute power and prosperity to the leftist constituency.
Part of the problem with a malfunctioning American political economy is the decades of gerrymandering pay out entitlements that have made a Swiss cheese maze of unintended economic structures, advantages and disadvantages instead of plain social equality. To rectify the situation it might be a good idea to create a basic income of $12,000 for all adult U.S. citizens, and $3000 for minors while eliminating all entitlement programs from food stamps, social security, military and government retirement to unemployment, guaranteed student loans and so forth. Every citizen would have a basic income until they reached a threshold of $41,000 in annual income. That would render social entitlements as plain as Roman was Roman law. Collateral benefits would such as a drop in people going to jail costing $50,000 annually because of economic stress related crimes. Younger adults would have more access to capital for entrepreneurial ventures. All adults would be better positioned to endure ecological economic and other tech shocks to the system that are disruptive yet perhaps requisite for civilization to eliminate its economic practices that are destroying the health of the ecosphere and innovate constructive, synergetic ecological economic procedures.
It is of course quite reasonable for workers to use collective bargaining to market their product that is labor with massive organizations in the private sector. Separately negotiating other labor benefits or rights to unions exclusively instead of legislating rights for all workers in the nation together is harmful to the sovereignty of individual citizenship collectively. Government needs to be flexible and adaptable; unionized government interferes with that. If a citizen wants more than the basic income during working years and when old, they should get a job or start a business savings some of their capital perhaps combining that with a few friends’ capital. It is interesting to consider that housing is the primary expense. Transport could be made very cheap with electric go-carts for local lower speed use and freeways converted to automatic electric slots for moving vehicles automatically to selected off ramps with proper spacing and low-risk, zero pollution inter-modal progress. Food will remain costly as it is increasingly internationally supplied and delivered.
My grandfather’s house purchased in 1965 cost $5000. It was a decent place with a very good garden. The average cost of a home today in the U.S.A. is something like $400,000; that exemplifies the failure of capitalism to produce a better cheaper product over time, as is the case with automobile transport. More so than being capitalism’s failure, it may be a failure caused by the unionization of government and the quest for retirement wealth and luxury that is unsustainable as it ossifies and reinforces a limited, finite and exclusive enrollment period to in an ossified political economy. Political and economic ossification are prime causal factors within Arnold Toynbee’s historical cycles of the rise and fall of civilization. Surpassing the cycles requires intelligent leadership commonly lacking from the left’s social studies.
With a basic income of $12,000 an individual could live well enough in the U.S.A. if housing and transportation costs were recovered to a 1960s standard with of course the addition of contemporary electronic devices, solar panel roofing, foam insulation and ground Earth heating-cooling..
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